Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers 296
NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash.
"The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."
Re:Overreaction (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Overreaction (Score:3, Informative)
The gyres (e.g., the Sargasso Sea) are where most of the nutrient transition from plankton to the rest of the food chain happens. It is a big deal, and you obviously don't know the first thing about oceanic life.
This is not regular trash floating in the ocean (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
Re:Here's a thought... (Score:4, Informative)
My impression is that the vast majority of the garbage is actually quite small particles and fragments, not whole plastic bottles and the like that could be scooped up with nets. Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system.
Anecdotal evidence (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Overreaction (Score:3, Informative)
Nouns (Score:1, Informative)
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Gyre [reference.com]
Are you going to believe your eyes, or our story? (Score:3, Informative)
So garbage is not randomly distributed throughout the oceans, but not surprisingly, it collects in areas of significantly increased density due to prevailing currents. How dense? Not dense enough to be visible to the casual onlooker. Only dense enough to be identified through careful study. So is that the story here?
No. The truth isn't good enough for a story. The truth isn't good enough to drive political action. So "scientists" lend their names to "authoritative" agencies like NOAA to come up with the story of a 1,700 mile "patch" of garbage. Alternatively (and dramatically), it has been called a "flotilla".
Yes, there's "a lot" of garbage in the ocean. And, it's a "big" ocean. Look carefully and you'll see that these stories don't do much to help you gauge what this "patch" really is.
"It's pretty shocking," said Miriam Goldstein.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet.
Thank you, researchers Goldstein and Hayment, for your contributions.
Look carefully through the photographs surrounding this story. Look for the 1,700 mile flotilla of garbage. By my understanding, this thing is a whole lot less dense than the stories would have you believe.
Here's a good one that I tried to track down:
This little "factoid" apparently comes from a non-peer-reviewed paper (page 270 here [noaa.gov]) published in 1985 that cites another un-reviewed paper in 1984 (can't find this one...Fowler) that estimated that 50,000 seals had died that year due to "entanglement" primarily in nets, as best I can tell. There's no more on methodology for determining that number, nor how it should be related to overall mammal population and more general "ocean debris."
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
Wrong. It's difficult because there is no "patch" (Score:5, Informative)
There are two things that make this difficult. The amount of garbage is the size of Texas and a lot of the plastics have dissolved.
A crew went to the gyre and recorded a documentary (a free documentary by VBS.TV Garbage Island [www.vbs.tv]), hoping to see giant island of garbage. While they did not see the island, what they saw was far worse. The plastics have dissolved and estimated that the amount of dissolved plastics is higher than the microscopic sea life and natural oceanic nutrients in the water. The gyre is now very, very gross. The garbage is either so scattered or very well dissolved that there is no way that it can be cleansed that easily.
Re:Any good pictures for scale? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't give you pictures of the entire gyre, but there are several taken during the March 2008 DXpedition [clipperton2008.org] to Clipperton Island [wikipedia.org], a small (9 square kilometers, 3.5 square miles), uninhabited (and rarely visited) island in the North Pacific about 1100 km (700 mi) off the coast of Mexico [wikipedia.org].
Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here [clipperton2008.org], here [washington.edu], and here [clipperton2008.org]). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog [clipperton2008.org],
Most [clipperton2008.org] of their outdoor photos [clipperton2008.org] have plastic trash in them.
Re:Anecdotal evidence (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Are you going to believe your eyes, or our stor (Score:5, Informative)
I did put some effort into understanding NOAA's role in this campaign, and apparently, a good deal more than you did. See NOAA here [noaa.gov] where the agency explains how it got from the "50,000 to 90,000" quote to their "100,000" propaganda number. Interestingly, if you had indeed taken the time to do exactly as you suggested, i.e. to google "NOAAA 100000", you would have seen this reference as the third link down. I took a much lengthier route, not looking to prove or disprove anything, but simply to understand the basis of the 100,000 estimate.
As NOAA's explanation indicates, they took the only loosely related range of "50,000 to 90,000", and from there, the 100,000 number emerges without further explanation. Your metaphorical characterization exactly matches my thinking when I saw it: they pulled it out of their asses.
I have high regard for the scientists of NOAA and their work products. I say this with great sincerity, and not to patronize your point. But in stark contrast with the genuinely authoritative works of NOAA, there are the political ways in which Presidential administrations and non-scientifically motivated high-level administrators of NOAA use its good name to advance political positions. In doing so, they besmirch NOAA's well-deserved reputation for good science, and cause people like me to use quotes around the word "authoritative" when describing the agency's "work" such as this. The politicians are simply taking NOAA's well-earned trust for a lowly political joy ride.
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable. If this ocean debris campaign is any indication of the Obama administration's approach, it looks like they will be using the NOAA moniker to publish political opinions as if they are the science of NOAA. This latter approach will be much more damaging to NOAA's scientists; it blatantly misrepresents their voices instead of just making it more difficult for them to be heard.
Re:Earth Plus Plastic. (Score:3, Informative)
My wife and daughter would tell you you're ignorant about me, but that argument would matter about as much in reality as your argument that being straight has any importance of the value of person I am.
He didn't call you gay. A straight man [wikipedia.org] is a comedy term.
Re:Watch conservatives spin it... (Score:2, Informative)
I'd like to know what alternative you propose as the cause of global warming.
I propose the Sun
Carbon seems the most likely suspect in the global warming game.
I suspect it's the Sun
Re:Is it full of (Score:3, Informative)
<a href="http://your-super-long-link.com">short description of link</a>
short description of link [your-super-long-link.com]
Re:Wrong. It's difficult because there is no "patc (Score:4, Informative)
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).